The most popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice, is now available for download, a release that includes numerous improvements across the suite. Although most users won’t notice anything obvious, this release includes numerous file compatibility improvements, which should go a long way to make interoperability between LibreOffice and other suites even better.

The first major compatibility improvement is that LibreOffice includes support for ODF 1.3. Along with this update comes digital signatures for documents and OpenPGP-based encryption of XML documents.

MS Office compatibility has been greatly improved with LibreOffice’s handling of DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files. With this new release, DOCX files now save in native 2013/2016/2019 mode (instead of the outdated 2007 compatibility mode). Along those same lines, XLSX sheet names longer than 31 characters are now supported, as well as the exporting of checkboxes in XLSX.

Tool-specific improvements include semi-transparent text support and better handling of quotes and apostrophes in Writer; new functions for non-volatile random number generation, keyboard shortcuts for autosum in Calc; semi-transparent text, subscripts return to default 8%, and PDFs larger than 500 cm can be generated in Draw.

New features across the suite include:

• Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration.
• A new icon theme.
• New shapes galleries.
• Glow and soft edge effects for objects. 

For more information about the release, read the official LibreOffice announcement.